The Renewed Mind Is The Key

the WRONG ATP!

2009-08-17T14:05:00.007+01:00

short version:
fuck you ATP, and fuck you MBV.

long version:
so this year's nightmare before christmas is being curated by My Bloody Valentine.
now before i start to bitch, lemme just say i've seen them twice, and they've been AWESOME both times. they've been such an influence on so many bands over the last 20 years of their voluntary exile from... well fucking doing just about anything, that all my mates bought tickets thinking the lineup might be picked with an eye to this. well, at least that's what i thought. i figured if portishead could do it (still my favourite line-up so far), then with shieldsy & co picking the bands it should be immense!
WRONG.
it seems that not only have MBV not recorded anything for 20 years, they also haven't listened to anything for 20 years.
here is the current lineup for the nightmare before christmas one:

* My bloody valentine
* Sonic Youth
* De La Soul
* E.P.M.D.
* Sun Ra Arkestra
* The Horrors
* Buzzcocks
* Spectrum
* Fucked Up
* Le Volume Courbe
* The Wounded Knees
* The Pastels
* J Mascis And The Fog
* Lilys
* A Place To Bury Strangers
* Witch
* Bob Mould
* Swervedriver
* Dirty Three
* Primal Scream
* Yo La Tengo
* Brightblack Morning Light
* Serena Maneesh
* The Membranes
* Ariel Pink
* Josh T. Pearson
* Lightning Bolt
* That Petrol Emotion

now unless you've never seen any of the bands on that list, then it's pretty boring/uninspiring.

without going through the list in it's entirety: there are a few bands there i want to see, but also a few bands i've seen about a gazillion times. and then lots i couldn't give a shit about.

spectrum and swervedriver are going to be a shoegaze (but n0t really shoegaze) geekgasm for me. lillys (depending on what mode he's in) could be awesome, but again in an old skool way.
i will be definitely interested in seeing EPMD, but some hip-hop NUT i know has said de la soul used to be awesome live, but suck now. so i'm a little bummed about that.
buzzcocks should be cool. i'll hate myself for doing it, but i'll probably go see primal scream.
but this is all music i've listened to for a LONG time.

out of the ones i haven't: a place to bury strangers i'm into, and sun ra (dead lol) arkestra could be cool.

out of people i've seen, i reckon yo la tengo, dirty three, and i have to say it: MBV are the pick of the bunch.
sonic youth. oh god. if they play old stuff i'll be happy, but i've seen them so many times now i just can't get excited by them. and again, it's stuff i've listened to for 25 years or something.

fuck bob mould. fuck j. mascis.

but someone should literally assassinate both le volume corbe and the horrors.
the horrors have been at ATP before. who the fuck keeps booking them? i just take one look at them and want to kill. i'm not going to fucking see them, that's for sure.

then there's le volume courbe.

have you fucking heard this bitch? fucking. dogshit.
and whenever i read anything about her, shields is mentioned.

Wikipedia for example:
In 2001, Le Volume Courbe released the "Harmony/Papillon De Nuit" 7" on the Poptones record label. In 2005, Marionneau recorded, I Killed My Best Friend with contributions from Kevin Shields, Colm Ó Cíosóig, Hope Sandoval, and David Roback among others.

i think she's actually fucking shieldsy, which would make sense. dunno what hope sondoval is doing with her though. ass to ass!

bah. ok, that's the main rant over i guess.

so then there's the second ATP... like fucking ONE WEEK LATER!
i saw the lineup, and nearly cried.

* Explosions In The Sky
* Tortoise
* Shellac
* Dirty Three
* Melvins
* Mudhoney
* The For Carnation
* Papa M
* Deerhoof
* Fuck Buttons
* The Drones
* Sleepy Sun
* Bardo Pond
* Battles
* Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks
* Sunn O))) performing The GrimmRobe Demos
* Sunn O))) performing from Monoliths & Dimensions
* J Mascis And The Fog
* Apse
* Alexander Tucker & Decomposed Orchestra
* Yeah Yeah Yeahs
* Modest Mouse
* The Breeders
* Lightning Bolt
* mum
* The Magic Band
* Edan
* Om
* Porn
* Tall Firs
* The Mars Volta
* BEAK>
* Afrirampo

SO SO SO much better. again, some bands i've seen a few times, but there's way more stuff i could get excited about.

worst thing about this whole thing for me, is not only that they're 1 week apart right before christmas when most people have used all their money/holiday days up, BUT that they knew anything MBV would pretty much sell out instantly and give that event out first. so making a few assumptions here, i'm pretty sure everyone dove in and got their tickets right away: which means unless they're lucky, fucks up pretty much most of those people from going to the second one.

me and ieatfog are lucky enought to have (just about) the money and the time off to go see both. i'll be broke and angry over christmas/new year i guess. but hopefully i'll be broke, angry, and also i think more than a bit satisfied at some of the bands i'll have seen in december!

so yeah, to re-quote the short version from the beginning:
fuck you ATP, and fuck you MBV.

more hi-fi crap.

2009-08-16T17:52:00.005+01:00

in fact, i think the next few posts are going to be about hi-fi. but i doubt that's what i will want to write about forever. so yeah, as usual, if you're not into hi-fi, switch off now.

OK, so after some experimentation with the kit i ordered (and have now installed) it's all sounding pretty good.
no (decent) turntable, so i can't comment about my vinyl, but CD sounds good enough to the point where i can tell a badly recorded album now.
digital music from the computer, obviously not so good. although the BARGAINOUS creative audigy 2 ZS . (i picked up a second one for about 18 quid for my HTPC, and ieatfog managed to pick one up for 13 quid the other day from ebay!) has improved things immeasurably, i have a problem with the quality at which my old CDs were ripped. in ye olden dayes when i started converting to digital music, storage space was key (as i kinda said in the last post). now that is not a concern, it's time to re-rip everything either at like 320kbps or use something lossless instead, like FLAC.
I'm basically putting it off until maybe winter now when i have nothing better to do (assuming i don't lose my life to WoW again), because it's going to be an arduous task with the number of CDs i have. ieatfog has said he just goes about re-ripping the CDs he's most likely to listen to first, and then works in an order of priority from there. sounds like a plan. FLAC isn't as appealing to me 100% at the moment, because i'm thinking of portable players. but i think i'm mixing up my applications here. again from the wisdom of ieatfog he said keep some shitty MP3 rips for portable music players. this makes sense, because obviously with most portable/heaphone/active speaker combos, you aren't going to be able to tell the difference, anyway.
because i'm so burly with portable electronics, i usually only choose the cheapest and most robust (read as unbreakable) items i can find: which limits what i can buy. this isn't really a problem for me, because the only time i really use a portable player is either when i'm snowboarding, and play it through a pair of cheapo sony MDR V150 cans, or summer time in the park through the awesome creative Travelsound 400 (i'm linking amazon here rather than ebay, 'cos i couldn't find any on ebay. but obviously, if you're going to get one, then don't pay full price for one if you don't have to)
either time the source is this little beauty: the 2 GB samsung YP-U1 (just linking google now, because i don't think you can even buy them any more). i bought it for snowboarding mostly, needless to say i wanted something cheap and almost indestructible. great sound quality for either scenario here is not something considered. i can't say it better myself, so here from wikipedia: "The trade-off of slightly reduced audio quality is clearly outweighed for most practical audio applications where users cannot perceive any difference and space requirements are substantially reduced. For example, on one CD, one can fit an hour of uncompressed high fidelity music, less than 2 hours of music compressed losslessly, or 7 hours of music compressed in MP3 format at medium bit rates."

OK, so i'm going slightly off track here. back to improving digital music quality on the cheap.
i've looked a little more into the offboard digital to analog conversion (DAC) option (as opposed to just upping the sound card) and things aren't as bad as they first seemed. although there's like some kind of continental shelf when it comes to prices once you leave the budget area, there ARE some budget offboard DACs worth looking at.

in original* price order:

Beresford TC-7510 @ £120
Musical Fidelity V-DAC @ £160
Slim Devices Squeezebox 3 @ £180
Cambridge Audio DacMagic @ £229

*original prices quoted from what hi-fi, because some are a little old now, and may be cheaper or harder to find

another cool thing about having an offboard DAC, is if your CD player has a digital out (mine has) then you can improve the sound of that by taking the DAC offboard too, and just using your CD player as a transport.

OK so out of that list: the DacMagic would be my preferred option (big time brand snobbery here, but to be fair it's also the best of the bunch - and of course the most expensive), but i'd check ebay for any of them rather than brand new. all you would need then would be a shitty soundcard with digital out... or actually in most cases they even take USB, so no sound card needed!

(by the way, i found the Cambridge Audio DacMagics going brand new at Richer Sounds at the moment, if you want to use that as a reference price when looking at ebay.)

the squeezebox also kinda interests me a lot, too. as long as you have a wireless router (or some longass CAT5 cable), you can just stick it above your hifi and have your computer in another room! goodbye long wires, and hello to optimum hi-fi placement. (though i don't think you can up the quality of your CD player with this one)

to be honest, and this is the bottom line: probably until i've re-ripped all my CDs to lossless (or as close to lossless using MP3), at the moment i'm happy with my creative audigy 2 ZS. and for the amount they go for on ebay, it seems like the best way to go for most people who can easily connect their computer to their amp.
if your computer isn't near your hi-fi though, it sounds like that squeezebox is worth a look. a quick look on ebay shows they go for next to nothing, too!

Hi Fi

2009-08-04T17:14:00.004+01:00

so I used to be a hi-fi snob. not like high end stuff, but i had a Nad amp, a Thorens turntable, Mordaunt Short Speakers, Interconnects that cost me like 30 quid. that type of shit. what would you call that? mid range?

then digital music hit me. in a big way. (well, i should differentiate here, because i don't mean CDs, i obviously mean like compressed formats like MP3 et al.)
the main thought i had about it was function and access, over anything else. an analogy here might be when people say 'you HAVE to see that film in the cinema'. my attitude was basically, as long as you saw the film, that was the main thing. see a film in the cinema: great, but if it's a good film, then rather see it on some nasty pirate betamax tape than not see it at all.
i go to a lot of gigs, so that's another way i view music at home as a functional thing, almost in lieu of seeing the bands themselves (until they split up, go shit, or someone dies - which happens to every band!)
then there's the portability of it all. iPods or MP3 players or whatever you have or want to call them: you can carry pretty much all, or at least most of your music collection around with you. most of the time you're listening to badly encoded (<=128kbps) music on computer speakers, or shitty headphones from pieces of equipment who's DACs are pieces of shit. for the most part, i still stand by a lot of this. actually hearing new music, is the main thing. everything else comes second. something else changed: storage costs started coming down. i bought a 1 terabyte hard drive the other day for 70 quid, and the price has dropped since then. so why rip your CDs at 128KBPS, when you can now store them at like 320Kbps for next to nothing? so then if you're storing half decent (or even lossless) rips, then why not listen to them on something better?!? (i'm slowly coming to my point) recently my mate jamie (blogspot twitter) bought some nice hifi. he bought like a beastly cambridge audio amp, a matching phono pre, to power a pair of mordaunt short floorstanders he had, and a nice turntable he was given (Nice is an understatement)
i stayed there recently when we went to the fucktastic (but just by a near miss really due to some shitty organising) supersonic festival. i heard his system, and close to shit myself.
it was like listening to music rather than hearing it. i dunno, that's kinda a wanky thing to say, but i can't really think of another way to say it.
i'd totally forgotten how awesome a well recorded piece of music could sound played through some good hi-fi. it actually to my mind, isn't really what music sounds like when you hear it for real. pre production, post production, overdubs, studio effects, etc. etc. it's a different experience altogether. BUT an awesome one.
it's something i used to be into, but completely rejected.

SO. coming back from the festy, and jamie's house. i decided i wanted in on some of that shit (but on a tightass budget version).
first thing i did was call my mate joel and see if he had any hi-fi (he's a snob, too) that he wanted to get rid of due to upgrades. he had this Arcam Alpha 7 integrated amp which i practically bit his arm off taking!
read any review. the amp itself is great, a little lacking in oomph, but here's the deal. when it's paired with the Arcam Alpha 8P Power amp, using the 7 just as a pre, it turns into something special. something that apparently compares with amps towards the £1K mark.

i managed to get one from ebay today, for 124 (including p&P)

add to that a pair of these Mordaunt Short MS-206 floorstanders for 70 quid from ebay: and it's already starting to look kickass.

i have a nice CD player. which while it's a DJ CD, it used to be a standard at radio stations. sounds pretty great, but if you really don't like the DAC? there's digital out, so i could just use it as a decent transport. but yeah, as it is, it sounds pretty good.

my problem now though, is that my computer sounds SHIT through all this. i mean even not encoded formats, but CDs played on there sound shit.
a simple way of fixing this, is to get a cheap soundcard with digital out. a nice AV amp/reciever with DAC built in, and let the amp do the work. that cuts out a lot of internal noise and interference from the PC itself (i'm not going to start giving too much of a shit about that i don't think)
so i need a new soundcard now. the best ones i've seen are RME onesbut they start at like £400

so i've done another cheapo version. figuring i need just about ANYTHING to improve it, i've gone for the creative audigy2 ZS. again from ebay for £22 (inc P&P)

i'll report what that sounds like, because if i can get it to sound anywhere near how my CD sounds through the system, i'll be a happy man.